- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Tue, 28 Jul 2009 00:53:59 +0000 (UTC)
There were some proposals to change <video>'s fallback model to allow markup to be used as an alternative to a video stream, so that once the various alternative videos had been tried, the user agent would make <video> act as a regular display:block element and no longer act as a video viewport. I haven't changed <video> to do this, for the following reasons: * We tried this with <object> and we had years of pain. I'm not at all convinced that we wouldn't have the same problems here again. * We won't need fallback as soon as we resolve the common codec issue, which is still being worked on. I don't think we should redesign the model to address a transient problem in the platform. * This model would either have to make <video> not dynamic -- once you fail to load a video, you can no longer use it, because it's showing fallback -- or would require us to introduce yet more state to keep track of whether we should be displaying fallback or not. * If it's not dynamic, we'd have to define what happens when you use the API when the fallback is being shown. Especially for cases like off- page <audio>, this would lead to a quite confusing authoring experience. * We'd need to have an explicit way of triggering the behaviour for <source>, given the way the media loading algorithm works. * It's a change, and I really would like to put the brakes on the number of non-critical changes we make. When the element was designed, we explicitly didn't do this -- that's why we have <source>, and is why the fallback is explicitly intended for legacy user agents, and not user agents that don't support the given videos. Which is to say, we didn't accidentally stumble into this design. All in all, I'm very skeptical that this is a good idea. What's more, any solution would almost certainly involve scripting anyway, and once you're doing things with script, it's really trivial to do the fallback manually, especially with all the hooks <video> provides, so the use cases don't seem that compelling. -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Monday, 27 July 2009 17:53:59 UTC